Scripture: Matthew 22:1-14
I’m going to start this morning by repeating myself, although for most of you it will seem more like I’m repeating myself when you read the newsletter. When you get around to this month’s newsletter, you will find out that I have been thinking recently about “coming out”, and I’m still in that place today.
In the newsletter I tried to describe the stages my thinking has gone through over the last week, a progression that began with a Sojourner reminding us that this Friday just past was to be National Coming Out Day. That was something that, when she said it, I was already aware of in a sort of vague or casual sort of way. It had been spoken of in conversations I had been a part of, and so when Karen spoke of it in worship, it was one of those things where you say to yourself, “Oh yeah, I knew that (sort of). But as Karen spoke last Sunday, this became much more than a casual matter for me, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Of course it’s not the day itself that’s been occupying my thoughts, but all the things it points us to. I quickly and naturally thought, and have continued to think, of all those for whom coming out is a current reality, something they are in the process of doing or about to do or have recently done. I’m aware through what people have told me and through the simple act of putting myself in other people’s shoes that coming out can be something that is anywhere from uncomfortable or difficult to traumatic. And so I have been thinking about people who are in the process of coming out, and praying for them even as I typed in the words for this sermon last Friday, National Coming Out Day. And I went to see if there was anything in the Daily Progress that made any mention of this, finding nothing of course, and I reflected on the problem of being invisible as it still affects people of color and most certainly affects gay and lesbian people, who appear in the media mostly as victims or as subjects of controversy.
Those kinds of thoughts led me to think other kinds of thoughts. For instance, that before a person can come out to anyone else, she or he has to come out to herself, or himself. And so my thoughts and prayers need to include those who are in the process of questioning or self-discovery in relation to their own sexual identity or orientation. And other thoughts such as that telling a parent, spouse or friend that you are gay does not mean that instantaneously everyone else in that person’s life knows and affirms what you have just told a few select people. Coming out, I understand and remind myself, is a long process, and it is not only a matter of a person deciding who she wants or needs to have this information or who he is going to trust with this information. It is, again as I put myself into the shoes of others,–it must be a matter of deciding what to say or not say, deciding how to respond in an endless variety of situations that can arise unexpectedly and at any time. Coming out is not something you do once and then it’s over and done with.
And then I realize that this is true not just for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered people. The same thing is true for me. I face an endless variety of situations that can arise any time and quite unexpectedly where I have to decide whether I’m going to speak or remain silent, whether I’m going to risk coming out, at least as an ally in any given situation, or whether I’m going to stay comfortably closeted with regard to what I feel and believe. I am reminded that as with race and gender and other issues of justice, there is no neutrality with regard to issues of sexual orientation in our society. As with other issues of justice, it is not just a question of whether I can satisfy myself that I am relatively free of the forms of prejudice of which I may be aware. It is a question of how far and in which directions I am willing to go in pursuing justice and fairness and respect and safety for people who happen to be gay or lesbian. There is no such thing as neutrality here. There is no such thing as saying, “This isn’t really my issue since I know myself not to be prejudiced.” In situations where there is injustice, to do nothing is to defend the status quo—and this is a situation of injustice. And so I can’t get myself off of this hook, and it behooves me not only to offer prayers for others, but also to ask for them for myself.
Up to this point, the progression of thoughts I’ve been describing in myself is pretty much the same as what I wrote about in the newsletter. But the thoughts I’ve had have led me in still other directions too. For instance, the thought that coming out, though it is a phrase usually referring to people revealing their sexual orientation, is actually a process that can apply to many more things than sexual orientation. We can come out to each other about all sorts of things, and I’ve been thinking about the ways we do and don’t do that as well.
We have, all of us of course, an enormous amount to tell each other about ourselves. Some of it is easy to tell, and there’s really no question of coming out about anything. Lots of things just come out on their own, no particular struggle or hesitancy, things we tell easily to just about anyone who will listen. But then there is so much more we have to tell about ourselves than what we can tell easily. Sometimes what’s inside us, what takes up whole large chunks of our insides doesn’t have the right words attached to it to describe it well, or there is not the right person available who we love enough or trust enough to tell or who is in the right place to hear what we have to say, or maybe we’re still trying to come to terms ourselves with some part of ourselves, still in some process of self-discovery and we’re not ready to ask someone else to embrace some fuller version of ourselves until we’re ready to embrace ourselves.
Still, whatever the obstacles, there is also the need for us to come out to each other in whatever ways there are to come out. There is a need to come out, because our wholeness depends on being able to be fully who we are with at least some other people. As long as we are hiding some important part of ourselves from ourselves or from others, we are still broken people. And of course we are to one degree or another, all of us, but our journey toward wholeness is in large part a coming out journey. As with decisions some people have to make regarding revealing their sexual orientation, other kinds of coming out decisions can be difficult and painful, and they can be healing and liberating, or any of the above or all of the above.
I was reading an article in a magazine recently by a father whose daughter had an imaginary friend. Not a big deal. It came out in the article that some 50-60 per cent of children have imaginary friends at some point in their lives. What made this imaginary friend different and what led the father to write about it was that this imaginary friend never had time to play with the daughter. The daughter would call her friend on a cell phone, but the imaginary friend was too busy to talk right now, she was running and would have to call her back, or the daughter would have to leave a message with the answering service, or they would find that the only time they could get together would be for a cup of coffee at Starbucks three weeks from now.
The little girl seemed content with this imaginary relationship, but the father was confused and troubled by it. He describes calling his sister, who is a child psychologist, and saying to her that he understands that having imaginary friends is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about but that he always thought the whole point of imaginary friends was that they would be there when nobody else would be or could be. Isn’t it a bit unusual, he asks, to have an imaginary friend who doesn’t have time for you?
Of course the little girl was just imitating behavior she had seen in adults, and probably the behavior of her parents, but what that means is that there is reason to be concerned both for her and for the adults in her life. And not, in my view, because they are too busy, not precisely that. People complain a lot these days about being busy. It’s often noted at Sojourners that we are a busy congregation, that is a congregation made up of people who are busy. But being busy is not a problem in and of itself. It’s a problem when we are too busy to come out to one another in the ways we need to as human beings but so seldom do. And it may be more of a symptom than a problem, a symptom of some underlying loneliness that we would have to face, if we didn’t keep ourselves so busy. The problem maybe is not the pace of our lives, which for some people seems fast and for others may seem unbearably slow. The problem is in recognizing the ways we hide ourselves from each other and in finding ways to come out of the various closets we all live in.
When we are busy, it’s not that we need to have more time to ourselves, though sometimes that may be true too. It’s that we need more time—busy or not, we need to take more time—to be ourselves, our whole selves, with each other. The time to ourselves may come in when we are involved in some process of self-discovery, or when a person’s relationship to God is real enough that there is time needed for some coming out in that relationship as well as in our human ones.
The ways we are hidden, the ways we keep ourselves hidden, our need to come out in various ways to one another, the courage that sometimes takes—such things have been on my mind since worship last Sunday. And those kinds of thoughts have informed my reading of the Bible passage for today, which is the lectionary reading. We always bring things to the reading of scripture. We are always informed by something. And this week all my collection of thoughts centered around coming out in the different ways I’ve been talking about it is what I brought with me to the scripture. Which is to say that I am very much aware that Jesus probably did not intend his words, Matthew did not intend this writing, to have anything to do with coming out in any sense. Nevertheless, there may be meanings here for us that Matthew could not have quite foreseen or intended.
Jesus thought of little else but the Reign of God, if we are to believe the portraits we have in the gospels. He tried to envision, to get us to envision, what the world would be like, not so much if it were ruled by God, but what it would be like if it were filled with God, and if we were filled with God. His stories are about that. This story is about that.
It’s about the reign of God, which Jesus says is like a giant party, a wedding banquet, to which we’re invited, all of us. This invitation is not about being invited to come to church, though I’ve heard sermons on this passage along those lines. This is not an invitation that is about being called to be a Christian even. It is not about some aspect of life. This invitation is offered more as a way of seeing life, so that when we wake up in the morning and are invited to enter a new day, we may imagine that we have really been invited to this banquet. And the same invitation is extended to everyone, so that the banquet is where we are all trying to get to, somehow, together. It is the destination of our journey.
Today I imagine that destination not so much as a wedding party, but as a coming out party. Somehow I don’t think Jesus would mind. What is it that invites me somewhere every day of my life? What is it that summons me in a certain direction so that I am not wandering around aimlessly from one day to the next? It is that I am invited to this party, I am invited to seek the reign of God, which today I imagine as a coming out party where yes, absolutely, gay and lesbian people are finally free to be themselves without fear, where the need for secrets or silences or don’t ask don’t tell policies has vanished, where there are no more suicides, no more disownings, no need to hide oneself, no need for elaborate deceptions-—but also a coming out party where all of us walk through some door into a banquet room and find ourselves to be in that place where we don’t need to be anyone other than ourselves.
There are lots of other ways to describe the reign of God. Today, this one makes sense to me. To see myself as beckoned to such a place makes a big difference to me. And it suggests to me that going through the doors I need to go through, coming out in the ways I need to come out, is all part of the sacred journey I am invited to make.
One more thing. At the end of the parable there’s a little incident where the host loses his cool because one of the guests is not dressed properly. It’s rather harsh—the poor guy gets thrown into the outer darkness where a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth occurs. Many people have trouble with this part of the passage. I have trouble with it. And it’s not easy to understand in the context of Sojourners where we make it very clear that dressing down will not cause any one to end up in the outer darkness.
I’m still not sure what the right way to read that section would be. But I can tell you that this morning I am interpreting it to mean that the clothes are just symbolic of how we feel about ourselves—not the outer reality of how we look, but the inner reality of how we feel about ourselves and how we see others. Today, the host’s insistence on dressing up is for me a reminder that in the reign of God that I pray for and live toward, we will all know ourselves to be the gorgeous people we truly are but so often have trouble believing ourselves to be. May we be given the gift of seeing ourselves and others adorned in the image of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 13, 2002